MUSINGS ON BASEBALL FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER

Tag Archives: Whatever Else

Do you know what’s easier than writing? Stuffing your face with Holiday meats and cheeses and alcohols, and not writing. I’d feel bad except that I don’t. A couple of dead-Internet weeks with the built-in Christmas excuse to be slothful and unproductive was the pleasant spiral within which I am most comfortable. And now here we are. A new year is soon upon us, the deepest and darkest dead of the baseball winter still to come. It’s got me bored and uninspired and pensive. Standard operating procedure.

I was reading the internet this morning, more specifically the excellent and Blog Endorsed “I Suck at Football” column by Alex Pappademas. In his most recent column, Mr. Pappademas talks about reading a Don DeLillo book I have not yet read (End Zone) and then quotes a passage from said book that touches on the very nature of sport, and fandom, and life and order and whatever else. I would like to steal and repurpose the quote here, because it’s a very good quote and also ties in nicely with the lineage of this Weblog, but also because it’s an excellent way to post something with very little effort.

The exemplary spectator is the person who understands that sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible … The exemplary spectator has his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it’s details he needs — impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language, by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name. The spectator’s pleasure, when not derived from the action itself, evolves from a notion of the game’s unique organic nature. Here is not just order but civilization.